


It Was Then that She Realized Her Mother Had Been Right about Everything

by Mime_Paradox



Series: Children of Rambaldi AU [1]
Category: Alias (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Diverges at Season 3 surprising no one, Gen, I know where they're going but don't know if I'll get to write them, Julia Thorne stuff, Morality stuff that didn't make it to the actual series, Subplots that may get developed later
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-03-13
Updated: 2019-03-13
Packaged: 2019-11-14 09:24:33
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,407
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18049859
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Mime_Paradox/pseuds/Mime_Paradox
Summary: She'd been warned, but it took becoming Julia for the lesson to take.





	It Was Then that She Realized Her Mother Had Been Right about Everything

**Author's Note:**

> I'd debated whether I wanted this to be canon compliant, or part of my nascent AU. In the end, I decided the AU bits were too small to matter, unless one considers Julia actually killing people non-canon, so AU it is. 
> 
> In any case, this is me processing one of the big debates the series the series should have had and never did, as well as giving a glimpse of what Sydney's time as Julia would have (or should have) been like.

**Taizhou**

Feng Xianghu had been a young, ambitious investigative reporter, working the city beat at the _Taizhou Daobao._ After three years at the paper, he had finally hit on the story that he’d been sure would make his reputation: an expose on the institutional corruption at the city’s police department, corruption which tied the law enforcement agency to several local and international criminal groups.  One of these groups, it so happened, was The Covenant’s contact in the region, and so when the police department decided that Feng needed to be dealt with, they called in a favor.

While unmarried, Feng had had a long-term relationship with another journalist, based in Beijing, whom he’d been seeing once a week for a year. Now, after Julia Thorne had slit his throat and left him the body in an empty business office, he never would again.

Sydney managed to keep her composure as she cleaned the blade she had been provided for the job, designed to look like a violin bow.  After she made sure it was free of blood and dry, she placed it next to her very real violin and made her escape. It was only once she’d returned to her hotel—where she was checked in as Maria Petronova—and made her way back to her room that she broke character and vomited. 

According to her careful count, Sydney had spent 35 weeks as a double agent for the C.I.A., a period she would have until recently considered the hardest in her life. Even her months in Covenant captivity didn’t really compare—after the first few days, all the torture had merged into an undefinable slurry of terrible, painful but indistinct. 

She wasn’t sure she could last another day as Julia. 

After emptying her stomach and signaling her handler to let him know of the mission’s outcome—she supposed it was a success—Sydney took the elevator to the hotel’s restaurant, which was small and pleasant like the hotel itself, and ordered her dinner, along with far too much baijiu. It was a terrible idea, she knew, to eat and drink precisely so she could purge later, but right now, she deserved the pain. Later, as she laid in her bed hating her life, herself, and everything, Sydney suddenly realized that things had somehow gotten worse: she now identified with her mother. 

\----

**International airspace over the Pacific, months earlier**

They were on a commercial airplane to India—Sydney, Irina, Jack, or rather, Sara, Catherine, and Andrew Godson. Their first family trip in more than twenty years. Jack had gone to the bathroom, reluctantly conceding that even he could not ignore his biology forever, leaving Sydney alone with Irina, who had been sitting wide awake in her seat, doing nothing for the whole flight—not reading, watching a movie, eating, or any of the things plane passengers did to pass the time. Maybe the explosive collar around her neck drew all her attention. Despite her complicated feelings towards her mother, Sydney couldn’t help but feel for her.  She’d wanted to talk to her, but her father’s presence had made that impossible. And now that he was gone, Sydney realized she had too many things to say, none of them easy.

Realizing there was no more time to waste, Sydney decided to aim high: “why didn’t Sark kill Sloane like he’d said he would?” She could understand the material advantage of it—an end to the state of conflict that had existed between his group and the Alliance for the past few months, replaced by open cooperation—but that didn’t wholly satisfy her. The answer she sought was more complex and amorphous.

Irina appeared surprised by the question, and Sydney wished, not for the first time, that she had any confidence in her ability to read her mother’s expressions.  The woman who was The Man was very so very good at seeming, she’d learned. “I couldn’t begin to answer,” Irina answered. “Whatever he’s doing, he’s doing on his own. It isn’t my plan he’s following. Are you disappointed that he didn’t?”

“I…I don’t know.” Part of her honestly believed, like she’d told Kendall, that actively working to kill Sloane was reprehensible, despite everything. And yet, a bigger part of her would have been relieved without measure to have Sloane dead, and was in fact disappointed her role in the scheme had been so indirect. She just wasn’t sure that part of her deserved the satisfaction. 

“Do you think he deserves to die?”

“Absolutely. He’s a monster.”

“But you’re not sure you want to be the person to do it. I see.” She smiled one of those unreadable smiles of her. “Maybe it would have been better if he _had_ died, then. He’s obviously coddled you far too much.”

Sydney felt herself stiffen. She wanted to slap her—the unmitigated _gall_ —but this was neither the time nor the place. It never was.  

“Coddled?” Her voice was carrying, and some of the other passengers had begun taking notice. She didn’t care. “How is killing the man I love coddling me?”

Irina, infuriatingly, refused to abandon her calm. “Tell me, is there any particular mission you regret carrying out for Sloane, before you learned the truth?”

A question she could answer easily, for once. “All of them.”

“But nothing specific—that’s my point. You’ve been working for them for nearly eight years, under the supervision of a man you believe to be a monster, and yet you cannot recall being assigned any specific task that you regretted. What else would you call that?”

She hated this. This is why her relationship with her mother could never be as warm as she (they?) wished. The debates. The way she acted as if she knew her, and attempted to undermine her confidence in herself, which tended to make Sydney feel like an idiot, because Irina always, always won. 

Well, she wasn’t going to give up.  “I call it keeping their cover. I would have suspected the truth, if they’d assigned anything too horrible.”

“Would you?  What do you think the C.I.A. has black-ops units for? What do you think the C.I.A. does?”

Sydney couldn’t respond. She’d mulled over that question on and off over the past year, without a satisfactory answer. Eventually she’d decided it was easier not to wonder. 

She wished Vaughn were there. 

 “Listen, Sydney,” Irina said, with that always-disarming kindness in her tone she summoned so effortlessly. “I’m not judging you for the decisions you’ve made. It’s remarkable that you’ve been able to remain idealistic after all these years. But this uncertainty of yours, it’ll destroy you if you let it.”

“And what’s the alternative? Become a heartless killer like you?”

“No, I expect realism,” Irina replied, ignoring the barb. “Don’t expect redemption, or that you’ll be able to get through this with a clean conscience.  Trust me on that. Anyone who tells you otherwise is lying to you just as much as SD-6 was.” 

\----

Like much of what her mother said, it had been difficult, back then, to discern how much she’d truly meant and how much had been manipulation. Now, though, it was clear that that particular advice, at least, had been perfectly correct: in his own terrible way, Sloane _had_ coddled her. Even after almost eight years as a spy, she’d had no idea how bad it could get. 

Feng wasn’t even her first. She’d killed for the Covenant before, and she’d do it again. It was better than the alternative. At least now she had actual digestible food she could eat when she wanted, a solid amount of money, and a level of autonomy she hadn’t had in her old cell. It wasn’t freedom, but she wasn’t greedy.  Greed would get her father and Vaughn and everyone else she loved killed, she’d been told, and it didn’t pay to disbelieve evil people.  She’d learned that lesson with Sloane. 

So yes, she could understand her mother. She still had no idea what it had all been for, assembling _Il Dire_ , and she couldn’t even begin to speculate what had led her and Sloane to team up with a man like Kazari Bomani to orchestrate a coup in Zimbabwe, but she could at least understand, at least a little bit, how Irina had become who she was.

They had a lot to talk about, if they ever saw each other again. 

 

 


End file.
